I was awake and standing in a crouch beside my bed before I really knew why. My hand was on the electronic lock on top of the gun safe and I was already punching buttons when I heard the pounding on my front door. When you live in the woods, pounding on the door usually means a neighbor in trouble, but the hair on my arms was standing up, and over the years on battlefields both wild and urban, I'd learned to trust my body when it moved into that kind of a primal response. As the black Kimber Custom 1911 slid into my hand like an old but deadly friend, I grabbed a tactical light and headed into the front room of my cabin. The pounding was light, but persisted in a frantic staccato until the door rattled in its casement.
A figure was backlit by the nearly full moon. It was a woman or a child, by the size of the silhouette, and since it was pounding wildly with both hands, unarmed, unless the weapon was on the porch or beside the door frame. I advanced to the door without turning on any lighting, inside or out, to maintain my own night vision and to prevent a tango outside from finding me, unless a U.V. vision device was involved, and that kind of thinking was premature at this point, even for me. I flicked on the 2 million candle power tactical light, and in spite of years of training, I recoiled at the visage in the light. I've seen the faces of the fallen, the dying and the stricken in my life, but it'd been a while since I'd seen total abject terror like that on the face of the young woman at my door. Her hair was streaked with rain and mud, and her eyes were wild, darting back and forth in her wide eye sockets as she screamed. At least it looked like she was screaming, but although her chest heaved and her mouth opened wide, the only indicator that she was even breathing was the fog of her breath advancing and retreating on the glass.
With the notable exception of her tiny hands fluttering in percussion on the door, the night was silent.
She was quite petite; probably not quite five feet tall, and initially, I thought she was a child.
Her eyes settled for a moment and she saw me. She immediately looked over her shoulder into the dark forest at her back, then back at me. Whatever the source of her fear, it was behind her and closing fast. Without checking any further for weapons or other persons of interest, I yanked the door open and caught her as she stumbled into my home. She was soaked to the bone and shivering, but before I could even try to calm her, she pulled away, shot under my kitchen table and slid to a stop next to the wall. She lay in a ball, pointing at the woods and screaming soundlessly.
The rhododendron beside the driveway shuddered, and a large bearded man stumbled into the driveway. His plaid shirt was torn and bloody, his woodland camo pants were soaked and a large stainless revolver dangled from his right hand. I flipped on my illumination lights, and the front of the cabin burst into near daylight. Not coincidentally, the two outer lights were pointed straight out, effectively ruining the stranger's night vision and blinding him. He threw one arm in front of his face to shade his eyes.
"ANNA! Anna, you come out of there right now, or I'm coming in for you!" He shouted, his shoulders rising with his breathing. "You're in enough trouble as it is; don't bring others into this! ANNA!"
He took two staggering steps toward the house.
"That's far enough, friend!" I yelled.
"This is none of your business! Don't take sides, or you will get hurt. You let my woman walk out of that nice cabin right now and I won't hurt you."
"I don't think your 'woman' wants to play with you any more, sonny. Why don't you run along and fuck a nice coyote, or something closer to your intelligence?"
His face went dark, and he started for the porch. I placed a .45ACP Hydra-Shok +P+ round into the ground between his feet, and he lurched to a halt.
"I don't see any way out of this that doesn't involve you dying, friend. Let her go and I'll make it fast!" He shouted, wildness glowing in his eyes.
"Better men than you have tried, son. You step onto this porch, and the buzzards will be eating your eyeballs by noon tomorrow." I went to 'low-ready' in the doorway and as he raised his .44 Magnum, I planted two rounds in his sternum, directly into his heart. He sank to his knees, looked up at me and said, "Don't do that again!"
His S&W 629 rose toward me again, so I put a round into his left eye. As the back of his skull flew into the trees, along with most of his twisted brain, I quietly said, "OK."
I had performed a tactical reload and was checking the trees for more tangos when the little girl flew past me and leapt off the porch. She stumbled straight to the body in my driveway, and began to kick it with great gusto. Her arms flew randomly as the sound of her foot smacking into the corpse blended with the sound of the rain on broad rhododendron leaves.
"Hey! Can you hear me?" I shouted at her slender back. She stopped kicking the man in the plaid shirt, leaned forward until her hands were on her knees, and she threw up on the body. She staggered a little, and I jumped off the porch and caught her as she fell. A few moments later, we were inside and I laid her on the couch as I stoked the fire up. I hustled over and got my medical bag and a couple of blankets, then returned to the couch. A quick triage told me that she was no child, in spite of her diminutive stature; she was dehydrated and that her temperature was 92 degrees. Hypothermia is a deceptively dangerous condition, and frankly I was amazed that she hadn't literally dropped over dead from all the excitement.
She started to fight again as I put the blankets over her, until awareness returned, and then she calmed and looked down at the blankets. I yelled out, "CAN YOU HEAR ME?", whereupon she flinched and grabbed her ears, nodding. She pantomimed what appeared to be, 'ears OK, can't speak' and motioned for pencil and paper.
"Well that will make this easier," I said out loud. As she wrote slowly on the paper, I started some soup on the stove, as well as some tea.
She handed the paper to me, and started to shake. "Look, I have to get some warmth into you," I said. You're hypothermic and dehydrated, so let's start with some tea, and then we'll move to some soup when it looks like you're not gonna throw it up." I gave her some tea, and she poured it out into her mouth, and then tipped her head back. I was thinking how weird that was when I started to read the note.
'Kidnapped a while ago. Don't know what the date is now but he got me April 13th. Got away two nights ago. What do we do with body?
"Jesus Christ, Anna," I said. "October. It's October 20th. The fucker had you for over 6 months. We've got to get you well; there are tons of people worried about you. I don't find myself in this position often, but I'm speechless."
"Me, too," I think she said. She motioned for the pad. I noticed with a shock how she held the pencil. Her thumbs were missing
I was the perfect target. Homeless for about a year, since I got out of college. Out of money, I went to a Library and advertised in the Adult section of Craigslist as a 'personal masseuse'. Drugged me, and I woke up in a house in Lebanon, I think. I fought every chance I could, and he finally sedated me and clipped my cords and took my tongue out. When I picked the lock in my room, he took my thumbs away and told me that the next time I would lose more. He is ,or was, a doctor, that's for sure.
